K-DOCS

Synopsis

At twenty-four, filmmaker Jinyoung Lee moved to Hawaiʻi in search of a rainbow. Twenty years later, she realizes the rainbow she had been searching for was never in the sky, but in the people she met. Through Karen Ahn, Hawaiʻi's first Korean American female judge and granddaughter of Korean independence activists, and entrepreneur-philanthropist Paul Kosasa, whose family transformed wartime internment into a legacy of service, she follows two Asian American families whose journeys began on the same sugar plantation 120 years ago. The film asks: What do we inherit, and what will we leave behind?

Director's Statement

People travel to Hawaiʻi in search of paradise.

I arrived for the same reason. What kept me there, however, were the lives hidden beneath its postcard beauty. After two decades documenting immigrant communities, one question has stayed with me: why do people who begin with the same hardships leave such different legacies? By following two Asian American families whose histories began on the same Hawaiian sugar plantation, Beyond the Rainbow explores how memory, choice, and resilience shape not only who we become, but what we leave behind.